October 2005
More poems by Roy Alan Jacobstein
Bypass
One day it’s Miss Scarlet with
the Candlestick in the Conservatory,
the next they’re carting someone
down the corridor to where Dr. Black
with the chisel in the O.R.
waits to crack the vault of a chest.
It’s not a calico cat, purring
all night by a child’s side,
not acne, not the daily rush
to the job, it’s a gurney pulsing
along a narrow passageway,
and it seems you are that someone
for whom the Heart Team scrubs,
a corpuscle the color of dusk,
wanting for air, and no clue
how you got there, nor who waits
so silently behind the next door,
Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum,
come to the Ballroom with the Rope.
HIV Needs Assessment
Everywhere the faces, hair, limbs
are coal, obsidian, flawless black
sapphire, thus the rare mzungu*
like me stands out the way those
remaining white moths once did
on industrialized London’s trees.
A month fluttering TheWarm Heart
of Africa ’s long length on this Needs
Assessment . We’ve found the needs
many. But let us not talk of that,
as the people do not. Focus instead
on the vivid oleander & limpid sky
that domes the arid volcanic hills,
its lapis mirrored in the uniforms
of the file of schoolgirls who stride
the side of the road. And when the talk,
matter-of-fact, beyond resigned, bears
left at the roundabout, glances upon
a cousin’s funeral attended yesterday,
the two added children your colleague
from Lilongwe is now raising alone,
funeral venues for this weekend, just
sit there as the Project Vehicle propels
you onward to the next Site, past
the lone ads for toothpaste
& for study opportunity abroad,
& the many for caskets ("lightweight,
can be carried by one"), & say nothing.
—*Swahili for white person, literally "to travel around"
The Taj
They tell you it’s a Wonder, a memorial
to love (Shah Jahan for Mumtaz, his wife,
and perhaps, by extension, of all men
for their wives, and vice versa, why not,
even for the very concept of Love,
and not only the Earthly),
that words can never do it justice
nor the glossy photos in the coffee table books;
plus there’s the poignant fact
Jahan was imprisoned across the river
by his son, Aurangzeb, just before
the dome was finally joined, and thus condemned
to view the finished edifice he’d never entered
every day those last few years of his long life.
So you show up at 6 AM, part
the burgeoning horde of vendors,
already your sweat-soaked shirt’s
glommed to your back, and lo!: shimmering
at a distance, immaculate
white marble and twinned waterborne white reflection
filling the archway with that roseate glow,
taking everyone’s breath and yours
as it was meant to do. But they don’t tell you
Mumtaz had fourteen children and died in childbirth
at 38, and Jahan had many other wives
who comforted him
and bore him many children
while he held dominion two more decades
before Aurangzeb began to reign.
The Mystery and the Melancholy of the Street
Piano in Melanesian Pidgin is big black box with teeth,
you hit him, he cry . Must take forever to reach the end
of the sentence in Pago Pago. And why is Pago Pago
pronounced Pango Pango, like it rhymes with tango?
Where did that n go? If it’s true the tango was invented
in Argentina a century ago, why’s their economy
such a mess today and when will the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo get justice? All over the world
women are named for what blooms—Daisy, Iris,
Dahlia, Lily, Rose —but no man is named for a flower,
which explains a lot about human history. Lady Day
always wore a white gardenia in her hair, even though
she wasn’t allowed up the elevator with white folk.
The Infanta of Castille may be the answer to the conundrum
of London’s tube stop, Elephant and Castle, whose origin
otherwise—like ours—is an enigma, a vortex of mystery
that must perplex even the most jaded urban commuter.
I know it does me, these mornings when a humid breeze
bodes another scorcher in the City of Brotherly Love.
Wasn’t Poor Richard lucky not to get himself electrocuted
flying his kites into those lightning storms, so later
he could have all his amorous escapades in Paris? A bad
bounce last night caromed me into the Emergency Room
with a busted clavicle. No sweat, you’ll be shooting hoops
again in no time the intern opined, pulling her figure-
of-eight brace taut against my chest. But who can hear
the word hoops without immediately seeing that little blond girl
rolling her hoop up the ochre umber burnt Sienna street
in Giorgio di Chirico’s famous painting that portends
the rise of fascism in Italy according to art historians
because the scene is a rigid geometry of arc and angle
and her face is unseen, and though she seems carefree
in the Tuscan sun, she’s rolling her big innocent hoop
into the looming shade.
The Odd Morphology of Regret
Lint collector, abdominal eye, perpetual
seat of kindergarten curiosity—
insie or outsie?—
you reign: universally mammalian, very
center of our being, mute remnant
of Mom long after Mom’s
become remnant, invaginated marker
of life’s arc. (Insie and outsie
inexorably recede.)
But please, tell us, Señor Umbilicus,
Miss B. Button, why you lack
those frissons of feeling
that got us here, you who should be
the ultimate pleasure zone—
shapely, accessible,
clitoral, to whom reams of paeans
would certainly be penned—
why you remain so
utterly unerogenous, ghost port
where all the great vessels
once docked.
Near Rusomo
—A.P. Wire Photo, The New York Times, 12/21/97
People say they have to express their emotions.
I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you
to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
—Berenice Abbott
Atomic Numbers
Mr. Gardner in 10th grade told us there was no purpose
to mitochondria, just function. Your lungs turn black
in a day if you smoke, black as that ink streaking
your sorry hands, thundered bald Mr. Strepek in Print Shop,
and stay black five years, even if a cigarette never touches
your lips again, and your breath stinks too. But Karen took
Home Ec., so she kept flicking Virginia Slims from the pack,
blowing onion rings into my face. Miss Testasecca taught us
the tangent is a function of the right triangle. Miss Piilo
made us memorize atomic numbers. Uranium: Number 235—
no wonder it’s radioactive. Pb, sign for lead, stood for something
like plumbus in Latin—or was it Greek? After semester break
she came back as Mrs. Giglio. Lily, she told us it meant
in Italian, turning to write a formula on the blackboard,
tugging at her tightened skirt. Things are getting tougher
all the time, Chucky Klein quipped. Years later he got
himself shot reporting Jonestown, survived, moved to TV.
I want to ask old Mr. Curran right now, How come The Lord
of the Flies has to have Piggy drop those glasses and why
did that 17-year-old leave her newborn girl in the dumpster
last week and what’ll they do to her now? Who’s the rough
beast he’d say in that brogue that caressed us like the tongue
of a cat. Some days you just want to be toes, curled inward
or pressed against another warm body until first recess crawls
by—then Mr. Adamson’s supposed to teach us how to shift
from second to third and accelerate into the straightaway.
Why Not Write a Novel
Make it historical. Akhmatova doesn’t return
to Petersburg and Modigliani doesn’t succumb
to TB. They take a ramshackle villa near Lucca.
She pens odes to the future, to oregano, noirs
under a pseudonym. He paints her angular
Slavic cheeks, that long lean body, draped
in electric blue. Picasso and Diaghilev make
cameos. Amedeo fleshes out his nudes,
accommodating Anna and her swelling belly.
Marina and Nikolai follow fast on the heels
of little Sergei, and all goes well for a while
but then—what? Envying gods? Il diavolo?
The basic fuck-up of forty-six chromosomes?
Something—that stealthy certain something—
slips in. Amedeo trysts with the lithe ragazza
and her auburn hair. Anna banks fire with fire,
and free love isn’t, not now, when the bambini
need looking after and Amedeo’s not selling
and no one, even in this fiction, reads poems—
and anyway the storm clouds are goose-stepping
through Umbria, because you can only change
so much, and if the TB didn’t get Amedeo,
his circumcised dick would, and Anna
would be lined up in the predawn frost
before a different pack of thugs, waiting
to ask about her missing men again. |
